Adobe Solutions for Manufacturing

In this article, I will review some additional features of 3D Reviewer.  I will address physical properties and compare features (not necessarily in that order).  We will start today by opening a PDF I created some time ago.  This PDF contains two versions of a design.  These two CAD files were imported into 3D Reviewer and “merged” into a single model tree, so I can easily toggle between the two or display both if I want to.  The file was then saved to PDF using techniques I outlined in previous articles.  Click below to take a look at the designs and features I will be showing.

The Compare Feature

Let’s start by opening Acrobat Pro Extended.  3D Reviewer can be launched separately from Acrobat, or opened by right clicking on any 3D window and selecting “Edit in 3D Reviewer”.   This time I decided to show the resulting PDF first.

Here is our “new” design.  Since I have two versions in this file, I simply use show/hide controls to move between the two versions.  Notice the ridges on the side of the bottle.  

And here is the original model:

 

No ridges on this one, but I wonder if that is the only difference.  I want to find out. Let’s right click on the 3D widow and select “Edit in 3D Reviewer”.  Now, we will select the compare feature as shown below:

 

I simply selected “Compare” from the tools pull down menu. Notice I have hidden everything but the bottle, since I know that the lid and filter are the same.  The differences are in the bottle itself.   Next I will select Bottle V1 from the model tree as the “old model”.  Then I select V2 as the new model (the order really does not matter.  It’s the differences we are interested in.  Here is the other model:

 

At this point, I can adjust the detection limit if I want but, I’ll leave that as is and just click “Compute”.  After a few seconds, I can look at the results.  In this case I have chosen to show just what is changed.  How many times would you have liked to compare two designs; particularly when you don’t really know what or if anything has changed?   Look at this:

 

 

Pretty cool, huh?  Notice I could have displayed new, old or unchanged.  Outstanding capability!

Physical properties

While we are here, let’s also compute the physical properties for our new bottle design.  Perhaps we want to know if the volume has changed.

 

I have circled the physical properties icon for you.  This time I clicked on the icon to get to the tool I wanted, but you can find it on the tools pull down too.   Let’s just click on “Compute” to see what we get.  Here is the area calculation:

 

 

And here is the volume calculation we were looking for.  The volume and mass are both computed (density = 1.0 for this particular example). 

 

And then the center of gravity is also available:

 

I can save all of these results if I want, but I’ll let you experiment with that, now that you know how to use these features.

Good luck with your work with Acrobat and 3D Reviewer.

 

 

Posted by Doug Halliday at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Acrobat Pro Extended is a very robust rich “product suite”.  In addition to Acrobat, Pro Extended includes Livecycle Designer for forms design, Adobe Presenter for training and 3D reviewer, a robust 3D tool set.  In this article, I will review some of the features of 3D Reviewer.  I will address features such as moving parts and sub-assemblies (hence the title), configurations, call-outs and export.  These will help you do more with 3D PDFs. 

Click below to learn about these features.

Let’s start by opening 3D Reviewer.  3D Reviewer can be launched separately from Acrobat Pro Extended, or opened by right clicking on any 3D window and selecting “Edit in 3D Reviewer”.  Here is what the 3D Reviewer user interface looks like:

 

Now, I know this is a little hard to see in this image, but don’t worry, I will help you navigate.   I imported this phone assembly as a precise, b-rep model by simply dragging the assembly onto the scene graph much the same way as I might do in Acrobat Pro Extended.  Let’s look at the model tree.

 

As you see, we have the model tree expanded a bit.  Notice some of the parts such as the front cover, lens, and so forth.  In a little while we are going to work with those parts.  Also notice that there are configurations that can be saved.  Let’s start there.  Configurations are similar to views.  They allow saving “states” of the model.  We will start by locking the initial configuration, as shown below.  In this case, I have simply expanded “configuration”, selected the initial configuration and simply right clicked on it.

 

Then I clicked on “lock configuration”.  Now I will be able to return to that configuration whenever I wish. 

For our next step, we will add a configuration by right clicking again or by selecting the add configurations  icon from the toolbar. The icon is the litle symbol with the plus sign underneath.  The two symbols to the right with arrows underneath can be used to page forward and backward through configurations you save. 

 

I renamed this configuration “Repositioned Parts”.  Now I will move some of the sub-assemblies around.  Here is how:

I start by selection the sub-assembly I want to move.  I can select the parts from the 3D annotation or the model tree.  I’ll move the front cover first. 

 

Now I will choose the technique I want to use to move the front cover. I have selected the move tools icon.  The move tools are hidden behind the icon showing two boxes and and arrow pointing from one to the other.

 

A dialog box pops up showing me options for moving parts.  I have several methods available to me to move the parts.  They include point-to-point, along axis, rotate around axis , move from axis to axis, move with coordinates, rotate with angles and mirror.  I will select “along axis”.  I have moved the part along the z-axis and clicked apply. I will leave it to you to experiment with all of the other methods.  

 

Now lets lock that configuration and add another.  I’ll call this one “add some more”.  This  time I will use the drag and drop tool to move the back cover.  Let’s try it.  The drag and drop tool icon is next to the move tools icon, and looks like a little coordinate system with some arrows.  Of course, you can also select from the tools pull down menu.

 

Now I will drag and drop by selecting the axis….

 

Notice that I could have rotated the parts, chosen any axis and easily positioned everything as needed.  Let’s do one more thing.  I’ll add a callout to the part we just moved. 

Here is how I can do that:

Select the rear cover and then click on the 3D Mark Up icon.  Notice I can select various attributes fom the part file and add them to the mark up. 

 

I just click “OK” a couple of times and I’m all set. Let’s lock this last confirguration.  Here’s our 3D mark up:

 

Now that we have created these configurations, lets export this file.  I am going to export as a PDF.  All I need to do is select file -> export, chose PDF as the file type, click save and I’m done.  There are some options I could have chosen at this point to select the “contents” of the PDF.  In my case, I selected “PRC B-rep plus Tesselation” and left the other option settings alone.  Below is the PDF we created, complete with all of the views, which are the same as the configurations we created earlier.

Here is the result showing the PDF open in Acrobat:

Let’s stop here.  Next time we will explore some more 3D Reviewer features.

 

 

 

Posted by Doug Halliday at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)